After watching its ability to help vulnerable children get crushed by lawsuits and liberals, a Christian-based adoption is now allowing homosexual and lesbian couples to foster children and adopt them as family.

According to its website, in a letter authored by CEO Chris Palusky, Bethany Christian Services says it faced a legal and moral dilemma: After losing legal challenges across the country, Bethany made the decision to surrender in order to continue helping the tens of thousands of children under its care.

In particular, Palusky writes, Bethany’s faith-based foster care program in Michigan faced “imminent closure” due to a court settlement there and similarly, in Philadelphia, the city stopped Bethany’s ability to operate in that city, too.

“Kids had to go somewhere else than Bethany foster homes,” the CEO wrote, “and it broke our hearts.”

Bethany’s decision has been reported widely, including by The New York Times, which reported in a March 1 story that Palusky announced the decision in an email to the agency’s 1,500 staff members.

“We will now offer services with the love and compassion of Jesus to the many types of families who exist in our world today,” he wrote in the email. “We’re taking an ‘all hands of deck’ approach where all are welcome.”

According to the Times article, Bethany is the largest Protestant-based adoption and foster care agency in the U.S., where it operates 32 offices nationwide that oversaw more than 4,500 foster care placements or adoptions in 2019.

Reacting to Bethany’s announcement, Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality says the adoption agency should drop “Christian” from its name.

“If you’re willing to put children in a home that is intentionally motherless or intentionally fatherless, in the name of Christianity, because Bethany’s got Christian in its name,” he tells One News Now, “then you are imprinting children in an immoral-led household in the name of Jesus, and that’s just dead wrong.”

What is a ‘family’ anyway?

Homosexuality is recognized as sinful behavior by the world’s three largest religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, which consider it a Satanic perversion of God’s design for human sexuality and, related to that, the raising of children.

Beyond those religious beliefs, in towns and villages far removed from Abrahamic teachings, the father-mother household has been recognized as fundamental for civilization for thousands of years.

That normal family structure was first called the “nuclear family” by academics in the 1920s, who were referring to the “nucleus” of the atom to describe the family structure, according to Merriam-Webster.

During the 1960s, the children of “Baby Boomers” began to openly question the usefulness of the nuclear family. That change was reflected by the TV: The wise but stern father delivering advice was eventually replaced by a doddering fool delivering punch lines.

The redefinition of family has arrived much later. As recently as 2008 Barack Obama claimed he believed that God created marriage for one man and one woman. Only in recent years, as Bethany has witnessed, legislatures, courts, and the media agreed with homosexual activists and their attorneys that “family” can mean almost anything including even three “dads” on a birth certificate (pictured below).

In the Michigan court settlement, for example, which Palusky cited, the ACLU announced in 2019 the State of Michigan agreed it will require state-contracted agencies to accept same-sex couples despite religious objections.

According to the ACLU:

This is a victory for our clients, other same-sex couples in Michigan, and most importantly, the children in Michigan’s child welfare system, who will now have access to more loving and qualified families.

Bethany faced ‘reality’  

According to the Times story, Bethany made its policy official in 2007 with a statement that says “God’s design for the family is a covenant and lifelong marriage of one man and one woman.”

According to the Times story, Bethany began loosening its requirements in states where it faced legal requirements to the point where it was working with homosexual and lesbian couples in 12 states by 2020, and the statement from 2007 was dropped in January.  

The reality is that the government runs the foster care system,” Palusky wrote 14 years later, “and we cannot serve children in foster care without contracting with the state.”

“The reality is that God created a mom and dad system, and that’s how you raise children,” LaBarbera counters. “And that social engineering that is happening is at the expense of children.”

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Copyright American Family News. Reprinted with permission.

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